How does the fraudster make money on reddit ads frauds? Reddit operates the site, so don’t any money go to them?
“35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
121–130 of 398 posts
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#122Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slot…
>Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever…
You don’t necessarily need to implement bidding on a dedicated slot—-the TV comparison assumes you’re sending the same thing to each user. This isn’t TV though, you can display different ads to different people of you wanted.
How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slots just serve as a bucket to allow advertisers to approximate their target audience, perhaps there are additional buckets for things like geolocation.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no expert, but one observation I had is podcasts seem to follow this model. Most podcast ads I hear are read by the hosts themselves, though a small number splice in targeted advertiser-provided audio (eg a UK soccer podcast will play me local Canadian ads). For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Inst…
Spotify will be inserting targeted ads into their podcast streams, if they haven't started already. Something to keep in mind for anyone who was thinking of listening to podcasts on Spotify. I think Stitcher does this as well.
Yup! Dynamic Ad Insertion is gaining a bit of momentum nowadays. It's terrible if you're trying to keep note of a timestamp. An ad that was served to you one day that was 30sec can be served to you next weekend for 45sec, which would shift a lot of audio.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
she will just have to buy ads on smaller websites, maybe during lesser traffic time periods.
Small publishing sites are all but dead. The internet used to be a lovely village where everyone was on about the same playing field and now it's a handful of skyscrapers surrounded by slums.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#125How is this not actionable? I'd get in touch with my state AG's office as well as the FBI.
Assuming this isn't Reddit, but just a bunch of users with AdNauseum installed, what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
>what do you expect them to do? Present a captcha before letting a user click through an ad?
Maybe not the kind where you need to solve puzzles explicitly, but a few months back I noticed they were running recaptcha enterprise on every page, presumably for anti-bot/fraud purposes. This would be consistent with the hn story a few months back which found that reddit was fingerprinting users through a company called "whiteops", also for anti-bot/fraud purposes.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play. No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot. You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.
Might be missing something, how is "every 100th impression" during a timeslot that on average contains 100 impressions different from just selling a single impression? Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.
Agreed... Timeslots seem like slapping a technical restriction from a prior medium on the web for no particular reason. I'm not even sure what problem it's actually meant to solve?
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#127What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?
Perhaps competitors trying to drain the budget of the advertiser?
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#128> Facebook lookalike audiences. Upload customer list (with attributes you want in your targeted demographic) and have Facebook create a lookalike audience for it. Incredibly precise What the fuck? Facebook allows people to do these things?
Why not?
Regular users used to be able to search for people using email addresses, not anymore.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
> Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime It still can’t compete with CPM Getting 100 or 1000 impressions vs millions of impression is not really competing for air time.
If there's no user information/tracking, what are the chances that any of those ads will be served to a potential customer for the small business? The GP's bottom line is that nobody except large consumer brands should bother advertising.
Re: “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”
#130What I don't get here is - who is doing this? I'm not sure who has the motivation to falsify clicks on Reddit ads. For Google ads, somebody might want to falsify clicks on the ads displayed on their site because they get paid by the click, but who other than Reddit would want to do that here?
Let’s not first assume intent. There are tons of scrapers running on Reddit. Reddit ads are presented inline rather than iframed/complex load behavior like Google Ads. Also browser extensions, browser behaviors (which smartly preload pages, prefetching) all cannot differentiate a Reddit ad url vs a regular link.
Reddit makes it much easier for any web traffic to follow through to ads. The issue is that Reddit doesn’t have a mature ad network infrastructure team to care about filtering traffic to better standards.
Given that only 50% are jokingly fraudulent, I’d say they’ve already done an OK job and aren’t booking an order of magnitude more of the web’s typical random traffic.